Do they regard screenshots as shallow first impression or something, why isn't there a screenshot link in their home page?
It is without any doubt *THE* most important information a first-timer can get about any program with a GUI.
Friggin "no-screenshot" religion.
Installation, bugs, first impressions
by
boa13
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
So, I downloaded Eclipse's 54 MB zip file. 54 MB! These things never stop to grow!
There were no installation instructions. Not that there's anything difficult, unzip in your directory of choice, do some file permission cleanup, you're done. Oh, and be sure to have a Java environment up and running - hey, it's a Java application, of course you better have one!:)
So, I start Eclipse, and it crashes politely, telling me to look in the log, and where the log is. Nice. A big Java stacktrace, how typical. A Xerces error. After some fumbling around, I understand my problem: I already had Xerces installed, and I had put links to the Xerces jars in my $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/ext directory. So, those jars had precedence over the ones shipped with Eclipse, a custom IBM Xerces version. Well, ok, let's remove the links.
I restart Eclipse, and it crashes less politely, with a startup screen sticking around until I kill it, and an unsatisfied link error. A symbol missing from a library, now this is quite worse. After spending some time on eclipse.org, I find the solution. Eclipse is compiled against Motif, and ships with a Motif library. But ld doesn't know about that, and tries to link against the system libXm, which is provided by LessTif. Quite badly compatible with Motif, indeed. Solution? Create a startup script along these lines:
So, I restart Eclipse, and it works. Finally. A README would have helped. Very nice, clean, welcoming, and documented. Quite fast, too, faster than Netbeans, anyway. I have not spent much time using Eclipse, I have just built a simple "Hello world!" in Java. It's a very pleasing environment. All the usual tedious tasks, such as setting a proper classpath and environment are done through nice and powerful dialogs. It is a very professional environment; you can in a few clicks be ready to debug your project against several Java runtimes, there's a builtin support for Junit and for CVS. The editor is fast enough, even though I keep preferring Vim, and offers powerful completions, code refactoring, etc. All the problems and errors are logged in a very cool ToDo list, where you can also add your own entries. I like that.:)
Eclipse is written 100% in Java, so how does it come it is noticeably faster than Netbeans? The secret is in th GUI. Eclipse doesn't use Swing or AWT, but another toolkit called SWT. Think of it as an AWT version 2. It offers Java programmers a direct mapping of the system widgets. So, the platform-independancy of Swing is lost, but the gains are tremendous: you get to keep the look and feel of the platform you're running on, and you're much more responsive to user events. The version of Eclipse I downloaded uses Motif. And it uses it very well: it's one of the most clean Motif application I've ever seen. The main problem is that the file browsing dialogs are still the same ultra-loosy ones, which don't hide hidden files, etc. There's another Eclipse version available that uses GTK 2. And of course, there's a Windows version. And soon, a MacOS (X ?) version.
So, what's left to Netbeans? Well, Eclipse doesn't have a GUI editor, and it was one of the few reasons, along with its debugger, that made me use Netbeans. But now that I've seen the text editor and work environment of Eclipse, I might well drop Vim when it comes to Java development, and use Eclipse instead. Clearly, Eclipse enjoys much more support from IBM (and friends) than Netbeans does. The QA is much better it seems, when you look at the final product.
Yep, Sun... you've been Eclipsed!
Re:Proprietary solutions will always lose
by
jockm
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
At this point it is fairly safe to say that Kaffe, GCJ, and Wonka are all more completely impleneted than Mono implents.NET.
This is not a dis of Mono, which I think is a fine project and generally a good thing(tm), but the are open source Java implentations. As Mono progesses, it will run into the same issues that the above projects have of being highly compatible, but not 100%. There will always be some compatibility issues.
Those who don't understand Emacs are doomed to reinvent it, badly.
I really wonder what is so great about the fact that Eclipse now makes it possible to rewrite all existing Emacs modules in Java, instead of simply using them. Then again, Eclipse seems to be just an IDE, so this critique should rather go to Gnome and KDE, which are more similar in scope with Emacs, just with a little less stability, functionality and comfort.
It might be time to try again?
by
vanguard
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I was just like you. I spent almost a decade using vi (sometimes emacs) as my IDE. I became so fast in vi that nothing else seemed worth my time.
Then I starting working with other sr. developers who swore by their IDEs. Things that I would suggest are a lot of work were easy for them. (Like moving a class from one package to another.) It's easy because their IDE either did it all for them or it pointed out the problems in an easy way.
Of course the debuggers are incredible. Being able to walk through code and see what happens to my variables is great. System.out.println is a joke is comparision.
Now I can wrap things in try/catch/finally in.25 seconds, I can build a getter and a setter for a private var in the same amount of time.
My "beef" against IDEs was that they robbed me of a chance to learn. I felt like they wrote the code for me. That's no longer true. I good IDE will match your braces, wrap code in try/catch, create shortcuts for phrases, (do all the "physical labor") but it won't take away the real coding.
I like IDEA but there are a lot of IDEs that beat vi (according to me).
-- That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
Re:File handle leak
by
EJB
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm running Debian (unstable) and have no major problems running Eclipse 2.0 - GTK.
You should see the CVS (Team) integration, by the way, that alone makes it a great IDE.
I've had it open for a week without running into the file handle problem, maybe you used an interim version (integration or nightly build) that has this quirk? You might want to try a newer build in that case.
Re:Java UI doesn't have to be slow
by
gh
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I use to be a proponent of IDEA, but a combination of it's huge memory usage, lack of speed, and cost has outweighed its great features -- i.e. excellent refactoring support.
If anything is a sure sign that there's a problem with speed/memory is the fact that IDEA has a status area showing the current memory usage. A click on it will force a garbage collection. THAT shows you what is wrong with most Java designs built around Swing.
This is not to say all programs designed with Swing suck, but you do need a strong knowledge of the architecture and design built around it to do it well.
Re:No support for web applications?
by
rbeattie
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Yep, same here. I was bewildered with 1.0 because it seemed like a huge oversite. Then I realized that IBM is selling their WebSphere Studio IDE which is basically Eclipse + plugins for JSP/XML/etc. and it all made sense.
Thought that 2.0 would be different, but I guess not.
Re:No support for web applications?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Precisely!
IDE developers out there, my first and only often criteria for judging any IDE out there is - can I import an existing project easily?
If not, it's not worth it - you're going to have to give me something really spectacular if I'm going to go through the pain of you making this difficult for me. Working with my current project lets me compare your environment to my current one meaningfully.
I didn't like Eclipse 1.0 and hate Websphere Application Studio (I had to endure over an hour uninstalling it the other day) - there seem to be too many "evil wizards" and I don't like the metaphors used by IBM - they don't seem intuitive. Eclipse 2.0 will definitely get a look, but I don't imagine I'll stop using IDEA anytime soon.
Re:How about Perl support?
by
standards
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Hey! Why can't anyone read and interpret my comment as written???!!!
I said if someone was developing a perl plug-in, I'd join them! I didn't say "hey, what the hell, why won't someone do something for me for free".
What I said (quite clearly) was: 1. Is there a serious perl effort? 2. If so, that's cool, AND 3. If so, I'm willing to help!
Geez, just because I don't think I have enough experience to begin the project doesn't mean that I am unwilling to participate and give what I can to the cause. And I don't want to start another parallel effort if others are already working on it.
But given the "just do it yourself and shut up" comments imply that no one in the Perl community cares, and so therefore either this is a new thought, or that I'm insane because no one else cares.
In any case, the "do it yourself or shut up" crowd is a little to anal for my tastes. If you can't provide value to the discussion, then don't bother replying - you'll just end up looking like an a$$hole.
Slashdot Mirror
Do they regard screenshots as shallow first impression or something, why isn't there a screenshot link in their home page?
It is without any doubt *THE* most important information a first-timer can get about any program with a GUI.
Friggin "no-screenshot" religion.
So, I downloaded Eclipse's 54 MB zip file. 54 MB! These things never stop to grow!
:)
/usr/local/java/eclipse/eclipse $*
:)
There were no installation instructions. Not that there's anything difficult, unzip in your directory of choice, do some file permission cleanup, you're done. Oh, and be sure to have a Java environment up and running - hey, it's a Java application, of course you better have one!
So, I start Eclipse, and it crashes politely, telling me to look in the log, and where the log is. Nice. A big Java stacktrace, how typical. A Xerces error. After some fumbling around, I understand my problem: I already had Xerces installed, and I had put links to the Xerces jars in my $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/ext directory. So, those jars had precedence over the ones shipped with Eclipse, a custom IBM Xerces version. Well, ok, let's remove the links.
I restart Eclipse, and it crashes less politely, with a startup screen sticking around until I kill it, and an unsatisfied link error. A symbol missing from a library, now this is quite worse. After spending some time on eclipse.org, I find the solution. Eclipse is compiled against Motif, and ships with a Motif library. But ld doesn't know about that, and tries to link against the system libXm, which is provided by LessTif. Quite badly compatible with Motif, indeed. Solution? Create a startup script along these lines:
#!/bin/bash
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/java/eclipse
So, I restart Eclipse, and it works. Finally. A README would have helped. Very nice, clean, welcoming, and documented. Quite fast, too, faster than Netbeans, anyway. I have not spent much time using Eclipse, I have just built a simple "Hello world!" in Java. It's a very pleasing environment. All the usual tedious tasks, such as setting a proper classpath and environment are done through nice and powerful dialogs. It is a very professional environment; you can in a few clicks be ready to debug your project against several Java runtimes, there's a builtin support for Junit and for CVS. The editor is fast enough, even though I keep preferring Vim, and offers powerful completions, code refactoring, etc. All the problems and errors are logged in a very cool ToDo list, where you can also add your own entries. I like that.
Eclipse is written 100% in Java, so how does it come it is noticeably faster than Netbeans? The secret is in th GUI. Eclipse doesn't use Swing or AWT, but another toolkit called SWT. Think of it as an AWT version 2. It offers Java programmers a direct mapping of the system widgets. So, the platform-independancy of Swing is lost, but the gains are tremendous: you get to keep the look and feel of the platform you're running on, and you're much more responsive to user events. The version of Eclipse I downloaded uses Motif. And it uses it very well: it's one of the most clean Motif application I've ever seen. The main problem is that the file browsing dialogs are still the same ultra-loosy ones, which don't hide hidden files, etc. There's another Eclipse version available that uses GTK 2. And of course, there's a Windows version. And soon, a MacOS (X ?) version.
So, what's left to Netbeans? Well, Eclipse doesn't have a GUI editor, and it was one of the few reasons, along with its debugger, that made me use Netbeans. But now that I've seen the text editor and work environment of Eclipse, I might well drop Vim when it comes to Java development, and use Eclipse instead. Clearly, Eclipse enjoys much more support from IBM (and friends) than Netbeans does. The QA is much better it seems, when you look at the final product.
Yep, Sun... you've been Eclipsed!
This is not a dis of Mono, which I think is a fine project and generally a good thing(tm), but the are open source Java implentations. As Mono progesses, it will run into the same issues that the above projects have of being highly compatible, but not 100%. There will always be some compatibility issues.
What do you know I wrote a novel
I really wonder what is so great about the fact that Eclipse now makes it possible to rewrite all existing Emacs modules in Java, instead of simply using them. Then again, Eclipse seems to be just an IDE, so this critique should rather go to Gnome and KDE, which are more similar in scope with Emacs, just with a little less stability, functionality and comfort.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
I was just like you. I spent almost a decade using vi (sometimes emacs) as my IDE. I became so fast in vi that nothing else seemed worth my time.
.25 seconds, I can build a getter and a setter for a private var in the same amount of time.
Then I starting working with other sr. developers who swore by their IDEs. Things that I would suggest are a lot of work were easy for them. (Like moving a class from one package to another.) It's easy because their IDE either did it all for them or it pointed out the problems in an easy way.
Of course the debuggers are incredible. Being able to walk through code and see what happens to my variables is great. System.out.println is a joke is comparision.
Now I can wrap things in try/catch/finally in
My "beef" against IDEs was that they robbed me of a chance to learn. I felt like they wrote the code for me. That's no longer true. I good IDE will match your braces, wrap code in try/catch, create shortcuts for phrases, (do all the "physical labor") but it won't take away the real coding.
I like IDEA but there are a lot of IDEs that beat vi (according to me).
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
I'm running Debian (unstable) and have no major problems running Eclipse 2.0 - GTK.
You should see the CVS (Team) integration, by the way, that alone makes it a great IDE.
I've had it open for a week without running into the file handle problem, maybe you used an interim version (integration or nightly build) that has this quirk? You might want to try a newer build in that case.
I use to be a proponent of IDEA, but a combination of it's huge memory usage, lack of speed, and cost has outweighed its great features -- i.e. excellent refactoring support.
If anything is a sure sign that there's a problem with speed/memory is the fact that IDEA has a status area showing the current memory usage. A click on it will force a garbage collection. THAT shows you what is wrong with most Java designs built around Swing.
This is not to say all programs designed with Swing suck, but you do need a strong knowledge of the architecture and design built around it to do it well.
Yep, same here. I was bewildered with 1.0 because it seemed like a huge oversite. Then I realized that IBM is selling their WebSphere Studio IDE which is basically Eclipse + plugins for JSP/XML/etc. and it all made sense.
Thought that 2.0 would be different, but I guess not.
-Russ
Me
Precisely!
IDE developers out there, my first and only often criteria for judging any IDE out there is - can I import an existing project easily?
If not, it's not worth it - you're going to have to give me something really spectacular if I'm going to go through the pain of you making this difficult for me. Working with my current project lets me compare your environment to my current one meaningfully.
I didn't like Eclipse 1.0 and hate Websphere Application Studio (I had to endure over an hour uninstalling it the other day) - there seem to be too many "evil wizards" and I don't like the metaphors used by IBM - they don't seem intuitive. Eclipse 2.0 will definitely get a look, but I don't imagine I'll stop using IDEA anytime soon.
Hey! Why can't anyone read and interpret my comment as written???!!!
I said if someone was developing a perl plug-in, I'd join them! I didn't say "hey, what the hell, why won't someone do something for me for free".
What I said (quite clearly) was:
1. Is there a serious perl effort?
2. If so, that's cool, AND
3. If so, I'm willing to help!
Geez, just because I don't think I have enough experience to begin the project doesn't mean that I am unwilling to participate and give what I can to the cause. And I don't want to start another parallel effort if others are already working on it.
But given the "just do it yourself and shut up" comments imply that no one in the Perl community cares, and so therefore either this is a new thought, or that I'm insane because no one else cares.
In any case, the "do it yourself or shut up" crowd is a little to anal for my tastes. If you can't provide value to the discussion, then don't bother replying - you'll just end up looking like an a$$hole.